With the mirror I used before, I could get the packages if I gave pkg_add the whole path on the mirror, including the exact packagename. But when I used the same mirror as PKG_PATH in my .profile it doesn't work.

I found a similar problem but with AMD64. It seems to me that alot of the mirrors are missing packages or parts of packages. For example I had to look far and wide for a mirror that even had RARCRACK. pkg_add died in the middle so I wound up downloading the ports tree and building it from source instead.

It's pretty obviously, one resets the environment.. the other does not.

su - root is the deprecated form of su -l root.

Quote:

Originally Posted by su(1)

-l Simulate a full login. The environment is discarded except for HOME, SHELL, PATH, TERM, LOGNAME, and USER. HOME and SHELL are modified as above. LOGNAME and USER are set to the target login. PATH is set to the value specified by the ``path'' entry in login.conf(5). TERM is imported from your current environment. The invoked shell is the target login's, and su will change directory to the target login's home directory.